Promoting strong public schools for Providence\’s East Side and beyond

Open Post- Let’s hear from you!

It was quiet here for a couple of months, but the action on public education is heating up again. There are more posts, and the stats for the blog show you’ve been reading. (I can’t see who is reading, only how many).

However, people haven’t been sharing comments.

So, here’s an open post. Comment (by clicking the on the comment link below) on anything related to public education, particularly in Providence, and especially on the East Side.

5 Responses

We attended the choosing schools meeting last night at the JCC. We could not stay for the entire session but found the conversation by parents with kids currently enrolled in public, charter and private schools very helpful. It has turned our focus on our sons education decision less on when we will flee Providence and it’s school problems and more on public vs charter schools in Providence. We look forward to a very busy month of Feb. see you at the Feb 7 meeting.

OK, I’m gonna throw a bomb here, so cover your eyes. Tell me again why we need Bishop to be open again?

I agree that every neighborhood needs access to quality public education for all grades. So how does the East Side get that? Not by tearing down King or Gregorian in trade for a “Bishop to be named later.”

I’ve banged my head against Providence Public Schools for a lot of years, and one thing I’ve learned is that no matter how or where excellence (or even “pretty goodness”) turns up, you cherish and nurture it. Never trade a good program today for a pipe dream promised for tomorrow. (And always, always, always question school administrators bearing gifts.)

King and Gregorian have been “good to great” or maybe “OK to good” depending on your demands for a long time. Both have good reputations, histories of innovation and diverse communities. King’s PTO and its alumni represents an important community treasury of social capital. Gregorian’s site based team is also a valuable asset. Both need lots of work to maintain and improve quality, but they have, for public schools, strong bases from which to build.

Bishop, by contrast, doesn’t even exist. It was a bad school when it closed and now the building is beyond reclamation, leaving us with a name and piece of real estate. (And speaking of names – Nathan Bishop versus M.L. King is no contest!) Creating a great new school from the ground up is not a sure process – the charters haven’t done any better than public schools on their tests, nor have new public schools.

It still might be worth the risk if it didn’t mean tossing out an existing successful school at King or Gregorian.

If the objective is K-8, then build the extra classrooms at Gregorian and King. If you don’t think either of those schools is good enough for your kids, then its unlikely we will succeed in building you a satisfactory school at Nathan Bishop either.

It’s good to see you posting. When I got started with all of this, your name came up a lot as someone who worked hard for good public schools. Everyone owes you a debt of gratitude for that, so I don’t mind the “bomb” at all.

I agree that we shouldn’t spoil anything that’s working. That (among several reasons) is why we rejected proposals to move the Greene program to Bishop. I also agree that King and Gregorian and doing fine. Did you see the post on Gregorian’s recent award?

It seems to me that you have a premise that having Bishop will somehow detract from King and/or Gregorian. We think not. In fact, we think the contrary. It definately does not mean tossing out either!

It occurs to me that you might have seen the misprints on the DeJong report. You do know that Bishop will be 6-8, not K-8? In that case, how could it negatively affect King or Gregorian? The original DeJong plan had only 2 of the 3 schools remaining open. The current DeJong plan has all three remaining open. Neither King nor Gregorian are going away any time soon.

Second, we think that there would be more east siders in King and Gregorian themselves, if parents knew that there would be a quality middle school for their kids to go to afterward. Lots of parents figure “why should I even start in the publics if I have to bail out after grade 5”? Or, they get to grade 6 and move to Barrington. Soon, they won’t have to.

King and Gregorian together, as they are, have about enough 5th graders to fill the 6th grade class at Bishop. They are perfect feeders. If we’re right (and the evidence is good) that more and more people will be drawn to the publics, and the drain of kids from this part of town stops, there should be more than enough to sustain it.